Do employees benefit from worker representation on corporate boards? Economists and policymakers are keenly interested in this question – especially lately, as worker representation is widely promoted as an important way to ensure the interests and views of the workers. To investigate this...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

The paper analyzes the optimal structure of the board of directors in a firm with a large shareholder sitting on the board. In a one-tier structure the sole board performs all tasks, while in a two-tier structure the management board is in charge of project selection and the supervisory board is...

We analyze the optimal ownership, delegation and compensation structures when a manager is hired to run a firm and to gather information on investment projects. The initial owner has two tasks: monitoring the manager and supervising project choice. Optimality would require a large ownership...

Does the composition of governance affect firm outcomes? We exploit the timings and thresholds of a gender quota in boards of directors and supervisory boards to causally determine the impact of a change in leadership on performance. Using a novel design and data on boards, we find that firms...

This paper presents a positive model which shows that institutional setups on capital and labor markets might be intertwined by politicoeconomic forces. Some countries especially in continental Europe exhibit a corporatist politicoeconomic equilibrium with a sustantial protection of insiders on...

We argue in favor of the shareholder model of the firm for three main reasons. First, serving multiple stakeholders leads to ill-defined property rights. What sounds like a fair compromise between stakeholders can easily evolve in a permanent struggle about the ultimate goal of the company....

The paper argues that the weakest link principle, which has been widely used as a measure of ultimate owners? control rights, has a number of serious problems. A theoretically more satisfactory method of measuring control rights, based on voting power indices, is proposed, and the different...

This paper proposes a theoretical model that incorporates corporate governance into the basic CAPM, where corporate governance affects the disutility of managerial effort and the possibility of managers to divert company resources. It shows that corporate governance affects firms' stock returns...